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Calgary Muslims honoured on Friday the two Canadian soldiers killed this week in separate terrorist attacks and condemned the men accused in their deaths. “Your actions are not only abhorrent, cowardly, despicable and inhuman, but you are unequivocally outside the teachings of Islam,” said David Liepert, founder of the Calgary Islamic Chamber Institute.

Calgary MP Michelle Rempel was sitting inside a Conservative caucus meeting on Parliament Hill on Wednesday morning when gunshots cracked through the air. Startled, Rempel peered outside and spotted a gunman engaged in a firefight with security and RCMP in the normally tranquil hallways.

The tragedy on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Wednesday morning — the killing of a soldier at the National War Memorial by a gunman and the ensuing mayhem — had everyone buzzing, but it resonated in particular with those who are connected to that area. Calgary Stampeders’ receiver Brad Sinopoli, who attended Ottawa University and has family and friends in the area, is one of those.

The deadly outrage on Parliament Hill will change this country, not just psychologically but in other profound ways. It’s now a bit harder to be Canadian — harder to trust, harder to believe in blanket presumption of innocence, harder to enjoy public ceremonies like Remembrance Day.

Earle Morris never turned the TV on before leaving for the curling club. He was sitting around having lunch at the Glencoe following a curling clinic, unawares, when, at about 11:30, Team Canada lead Nolan Thiessen asked him: “Did you hear what happened in Ottawa?”

Kevin Vickers is being hailed as a hero for reportedly shooting an assailant on Parliament Hill Wednesday morning ­­— but his sister says he’s still her younger brother, and she just wants him to be safe. Vickers, 58, the sergeant-at-arms in the House of Commons, is a former Calgary RCMP officer with an extensive policing background and has provided security services for dignitaries, including members of the Royal Family.

Dudes! Mickey Henry and Pete Schmalz, the two totally stoked brahs from Muksoka, are the winners of the grand prize on Season 2 of The Amazing Race Canada. The “long hair, don’t care” duo are taking home $250,000, a pair of Chevy Silverado High Country editions, free gas for life at Petro-Canada and 10 round-trips for two in business class anywhere Air Canada flies over the course of a year for their efforts over the 40,000 kilometres of the Race. Sweet!

Premier Alison Redford confounded opponents in rising to the top of Alberta politics, becoming the province’s first female premier and extending the Progressive Conservatives’ four-decade grip on power. But on Wednesday, Redford lost her own grip on the leadership of the PC party — undone by unrelenting pressure within the Tory ranks for her to step aside.

The enthusiastic tour guide crouched behind one of my daughters and told another one — buckled into a fighter-pilot seat — to activate the ejection mechanism. The small crowd held its breath. She didn’t go shooting into the air, of course.

OTTAWA — One is a left-wing academic from the West Coast, the kind of oilsands industry-unfriendly elite Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives tend to view with contempt. The other is a Saskatchewan farmer, fervently anti-abortion and a skeptic of climate change science.

The people have spoken, louder than ever before. In a civic election that brought out an unprecedented 26 hopefuls for a spot on its town council, a record number also came out Monday to polling stations both in the heart of this flood-devastated town and at Saddlebrook Camp, the temporary home for close to 2,000 residents displaced by the roiling waters that overflowed the banks of the Highwood River back in June.

Federal politicians were officially told Friday that they won’t be needed back on Parliament Hill for another month, as the Governor General granted the prime minister’s request to start a new session of Parliament in mid-October.

As abortion continues to be a divisive issue within the federal Tory government, a group seeking to end the practice in Canada is taking aim at Prime Minister Stephen Harper and fellow Calgary Conservative MP Michelle Rempel. The Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform is distributing thousands of explicit postcards in Harper’s Calgary Southwest and Rempel’s Calgary Centre-North ridings that feature pictures of aborted fetuses next to the politicians’ faces.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Tuesday he is “not happy” with the actions of some Senators and with the conduct of his own office. The message was delivered in a speech to the Conservative caucus on Parliament Hill, as the Senate expense scandal enveloped Harper’s government. “I did not get into politics to defend the Senate,” said Harper.

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